Kaspersky North American channel chief Chris Doggett

NASSAU, THE BAHAMAS – It took some time for it to go primetime, but Kaspersky Lab formally introduced its managed security service offering to the market at its North American Partner Conference here.

First introduced to channel partners at its Americas Partner Conference in the winter of 2011, the managed service edition offers MSPs the ability to offer Kaspersky’s endpoint security on a pay-as-you-go basis, with little to no upfront fee. The solution has been in beta with a select group of channel partners for some time now, but is starting to live. Partners at the Conference here will be given first crack at it, with other partners to get access in short order.

Some more thoughts on the launch after the jump, but first, this brief introduction from North American channel chief Chris Doggett.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAGtCHzHBnU

“We’ve really coalesced around a model that’s very good for our partners,” Doggett said. “It’s a great way for them expand into managed services or branch out their business right out of the gate.”

The model is simple: Rather than partners (or customers) paying an upfront annual subscription license, the MSP model allows partners to pay on a monthly basis for the number of seats of endpoint and messaging security they manage for their customers. It’s up to the partner to set their own price, and decide on whether the offering is presented as a Kaspersky product, white-labeled, or anywhere in between.

“It’s a great margin play and it’s extremely stick,” said Kevin Krempulec, head of sales for Eastern North America and Canadian team leader. “Customers you’re managing like this aren’t customers you’re going to lose in a pricing war.”

From an administration point of view, it works just like Kaspersky’s other offerings – with all customers feeding back into a partner’s Kaspersky dashboard, including customers on Windws, Mac OS, and any of the mobile devices supported by Kaspersky, as well as virtualization customers through its partnership with VMware.

Krempulec said adding managed endpoint security speaks to the SMB managed services strongpoint of taking on most of a client’s IT challenges, of “them wanting to get back to running their core business.”

But just because Kaspersky hadn’t built it yet didn’t mean they hadn’t yet come. I talked to several partners at the show who were already offering managed endpoint security to their customers, doing so by spreading out the license cost (plus their own margins) over the course of a year. Those partners said the flexibility of a true month-to-month offering was appealing, but didn’t seem in any particular hurry to get their existing managed customers switched over to the new offering.

We caught up with Craig West, NetSuite’s channel chief, just after the partner keynote and sessions, to find out what was on the agenda for that session, and what partners can expect from the rest of the SuiteWorld event here this week.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLJsPGT2Pc

Citrix CEO Mark Templeton

SAN FRANCISCO – As the curtain came down on Citrix’s Summit 2012 partner conference here last night, the curtain came up on its Synergy 2012 end-user conference, which begins in earnest this morning.

And so shifts the focus from partners’ journeys to the cloud, business model transformation, and new opportunities, to some new technologies and products that Citrix will be letting loose into the channel in the near future.

Expect more details on the company’s new approach of focusing on “mobile workstyles” and cloud services, continuing its efforts to position itself as a leader in the BYOD era.

It will be CEO Mark Templeton and likely a number of the company’s product and technology leaders. Expect the liveblog to go live as the keynotes begin – about 10:30 am Pacific time (1:30 pm Eastern.)

At its Synergy Barcelona event last fall, Cirtix promised the first HDX System-on-a-chip products here at the show this week. What will they look like? At Summit, there was a lot of talk about the impact of the company’s acquisitions last year of ShareFile and Podio. How will those products fit into its strategy? Join us for the liveblog, and find out as its discussed here at Synergy.

(Editor’s Note: This is the first time we’re playing with using Storify, a “social stories” Web service for creating live content aggregetating original content and comments and content from the social media world. Let me know what you think!)

Citrix channel chief Tom Flink.

SAN FRANCISCO – Ever wondered exactly how a vendor partner sees your business, and your partnership with them? Not the niceties,the cordial personal relationships, the motherhood and apple pie statements of commitment and support – but the actual numbers, rates and metrics that vendors use to measure their own business with you and through you?

Citrix is getting set to give its partners an opportunity to stand in front of those full-length mirrors, and get a full look at themselves as they look in the vendor’s eyes.

At its Summit event here this week, the company is previewing new Partner Dashboards, part of its MyCitrix partner portal and set to debut in the second week of June, according to Tom Flink, vice president of worldwide channels and market development at the company.

The Partner Dashboard essentially presents to partners all of the numbers and metrics that Citrix collects on their partners, in real-time, and as Citrix sees them.

The metrics have come together as a result of a project known internally at Citrix as “Partner 360,” in which the company completely re-architected its partner management systems to allow easy access to any number of metrics, from rolling four quarter comparisons, to real-time sales numbers, to deep drilldowns on pipeline and leads. When combined with the data gathered on pipeline through the company’s Partner Rewards program, Flink said it “drives a really complete picture” of each partner’s business with Citrix.

“Having a shared understanding of our situation is super-important,” Flink said. “And this really allows partners to see themselves as we’re seeing them, their productivity with us, their number of certified people, the details of their pipeline, so that when they’re working with our channel managers and looking at our business together, we’re looking at the same things.”

Having access to the data is interesting and important – it gives solution providers a unique look into how the vendor looks at them, and gives them the chance to more proactively address any discrepancies between the vendor’s view of their business and their own. If done right, it has the potential to create a tremendously transparent common language or framework for vendor/partner discussions and negotiations.

But perhaps where things get really interesting for Citrix partners is in “phase two,” as Flink puts it. There are no firm dates attached to phase two, but Flink says that already baked into the system (both the dashboard and the underlying infrastructure at Citrix) is the ability to do to shared goals between the vendor and its partners.

“What I’d like to do in the future, is create a system of rewarding partners for hitting those joint goals,” Flink said. “And with this system, we have the infrastructure to do that.”

Tony Vottima, Avnet's HP solutions group chief

HP has named Avnet Technology Solutions the first distribution partner in its ServiceOne partner program, a deal that could greatly improve the ability of Avnet VARs to sell and offer HP-branded services.

Launched last summer, ServiceOne is a program that allows authorized HP enterprise partners to not only sell, but implement HP-branded services. Under previous program, partners could sell those service offerings, but implementation was left to the vendor’s own services arm.

Adding a distributor to the mix opens up an interesting number of possibilities for partners: solution providers can resell the vendor’s services packages, and rely on HP to deliver them, deliver them themselves (if authorized) or turn to the distributor for implementation, should they lack the technical skills or geographic range to meet customer demands.

“We’ve been on a journey as a company to figure out how to grow our partners’ business, and with HP announcing the ServiceOne program, we saw an excellent opportunity to both scale that program and add technical and engineering resources for our partners,” said Tony Vottima, general manager of Avnet’s HP solutions group for the Americas.

Avnet is starting out with about 24 engineers in the Americas, with engineering and sales resources divided between Canada and the U.S., Vottima said. The company currently is almost at that number of engineers, with a mix of employees and contractors, but is looking to get to 24 on-staff HP services professionals available to partners in short order.

Those 24 resources will be focused primarily on three of the major service packages under ServiceOne: starting up and standing up Industry-Standard Server solutions; starting up and standing up 3Par storage solutions; and offering HP Cloud Discovery Workshops. Vottima said those three offerings were chosen as starting points because of the high demand for those particular solutions areas.

The services also offer significant opportunities to increase partner profitability, Vottima suggested. That’s both because of the inherent boost from getting the services revenue (even if it is shared with the distributor if a partner uses the distributor’s resources for implementation), and more crucially, because of the increased access they give solution providers into their existing customers.

“Once you have the opportunity to be in a services mode inside the data centre, you get a broader view of the services opportunities inside the customer as a whole,” Vottima said. “This is more than an in-and-out kind of engagement, this gives you the opportunity to look for more services opportunities inside those customers.”

He added that Avnet’s own implementation teams will be trained and expected to do just that for the partners they’re looking for – seeking opportunities that can be brought back to the solution providers for expanded engagement and value-add.

Vottima said he saw the distributor playing a variety of roles with its mix of partners – providing simple advisory services and helping partners purchase ServiceOne packages for their own implementations, as well as helping to “fill gaps in their benches” and helping partners to offer a more robust service offering in a hybrid model, as well as helping some solution providers with more complete service delivery capabilities, either on an ongoing basis or as a way to more quickly spin up a practice, using the distributor’s services team to offer services while the solution provider builds their own expertise and authorizations around the services.

“As we continue down our solutions strategy in high-growth vertical markets, we think this is the next level for us, providing more services capabilities to our partners as they look to sell more solutions,” Vottima said. “It’s a natural migration for us.”

Todd Hsu, now director of consulting services for Canada at Citrix.

SAN FRANCISCO – Citrix Systems is ramping up its services organization in Canada with its purchase of a longtime partner, TH Consultants out of Montreal.

The software company formally announced the purchase, which closed April 24, at its Citrix Summit partner conference her Tuesday. Because TH was privately held, terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Hector Lima, vice president of Americas field services, said the company snapped up THC to build capacity for its enterprise-focused services in Canada. Although the Canadian services business has been flat year-over-year, it’s not been because of a lack of opportunities, but rather, limited resources to meet those opportunities.

With the 10 TH Consultants staffers on board, the company will now have 15 consultants in Canada, will have its first formal presence in Quebec, and will be able to provide a lot more architecture and design services to enterprise customers in Eastern Canada.

For Todd Hsu, founder of TH Consultants and now director of consulting services for Canada at Citrix, being purchased by Citrix provides a validation of his company’s work for the vendor. Citrix was by far the biggest vendor for THC since its debut in 1997, representing north of 80 per cent of its business.

“We’ve been doing all of these things already [for Citrix] without really collecting a paycheque,” Hsu quipped, adding that TH has followed Citrix through its evolution from server computing to virtualization over the last decade and a half. “We really grew a deep affection for the company and to its technology.”

The acquisition is the first services buy for Citrix since it originally built up its consulting services business in 2000 through the purchase of Miami-based Innovex Group. Since then, the company has grown its services organically, and while Lima said it has built “a stable and predictable” recruitment engine for services professionals Stateside, that isn’t necessarily the case in Canada or other geographies. Lima said the services organization will be looking at making “targeted acquisitions” of smaller services organizations going forward.

“TH Consultants really fits our criteria – it’s a manageable size for us, they specialize in services and in Citrix services in particular,” Lima said. “We’re not looking to acquire demand, we’re looking to create capacity.”

Todd and his team will now manage the company’s services organization in Eastern Canada and the federal government, as well as top enterprise customers in Toronto.

Lima said that while much of THC’s project work was wrapped up prior to the acquisition, it’s now going through the process of figuring out what to do with its recurring revenue customers, many of whom don’t fit in with Citrix services’ approach on early-stage design and architecture opportunities. Much of that business may be turned over to appropriate Citrix partners, Lima suggested.

As an independent, TH Consultants had strong connections to many of the major Citrix partners, Hsu said. And that’s likely to continue, especially given that the services business tends to work closely with solution providers, both subcontracting work to the channel and handing its early analysis, design and piloting work to the partner of a customer’s choice for procurement, implementation and ongoing support. It’s a familiar role for Hsu.

“We have a unique relationship with the local competition,” Hsu said. “When everyone thinks of of me, thy think of Citrix. And when they think of Citrix, they think of me. The Metafores, the Bells, the Softchoices of the world, when they have a Citrix problem, they call us. We were already there to help everyone, and although our name badge is changing, that remains the same. Just now, instead of 10 people, we’re 150 strong [in the North American Citrix consulting business.]”

New Citrix Canada country manager Michael Murphy

SAN FRANCISCO – Michael Murphy is on his 17th day as new Canadian country manager for Citrix System as he sits down with the Canadian channel press community at this week’s Citrix Summit event here. Okay, maybe he’s actually on his 18th day, depending on whether you define a pre-employment day spent getting to know his new workmates at the company’s Mississauga, Ont. Canadian headquarters.

Despite his short tenure in his current job, the executive (best known, of course, for spending more than a decade and a half at the helm of Symantec Canada) already has his first major initiative for the company’s partner community.

He’s got to refine the company’s controversial High Touch program, and make it more suited for Canada.

Introduced at the start of 2012, the High Touch program is one where Citrix owns the sales process – but Murphy stresses not the fulfillment process, that’s still 100 per cent channel – for a named account list of top enterprise customers. It’s a program that Murphy supports: there is a need for the company to be able to play orchestrator for the very largest of its customers, to make sure Citrix has “a deeper relationship” with all of its top customers, many of whom may work with multiple solution providers in various departments or on various projects.

Beyond the typical – and healthy – channel antsiness anytime any vendor does anything that even remotely looks like a move to take any portion of the business direct, Murphy cedes there is a problem with the way High Touch was initially rolled out in Canada. Put simply, there are just far too many companies on the company’s High Touch list.

“We need to revamp the High Touch threshold,” Murphy said. “We need to refine that down to a truly manageable number.”

What is that number? Murphy admits he doesn’t have all the data yet – but he said he believes it’s less than half of the current number, and possibly as low as just more than a quarter of it. He’s promised to get it fixed, and he said he’s committed to getting it done as quickly as possible, once he has all the feedback he needs to make the right decision.

“I only get one chance to make it right with them before they won’t believe me next time,” Murphy said.

Just a fortnight into his new role, Murphy’s got another channel-facing change in mind as well. He said he’s got a plan to increase the number of partner-facing resources on staff at Citrix in Canada. Currently, the company has just one person focused on managing channel relationships, largely focused on managing the company’s top partners, and Ingram Micro, its exclusive distie. But he feels that there’s another layer of smaller partners – its Silver and Registered tier partners – who would benefit from more direct attention from the software company, along with ongoing attention from distribution.

How many more resources are coming? “Well, that depends on my boss,” Murphy said with a smile.

He may be new in the role, but there are a lot of familiar faces as he goes out and meets the company’s partners.

Well, that’s not entirely true. There are a lot of familiar faces in the company’s channel ranks – Murphy estimates that about 50 per cent of the company’s VARs were also Symantec VARs, and there’s complete overlap between the two companies’ LAR communities. But while Murphy has been busy taking phone calls from those familiar partners, fielding their e-mails and LinkedIn requests, he’s focusing on Citrix VARs with which he does not have a previous relationship for his introductory tour of Canada.

His questions for partners: “What’s in your opportunity pipeline?” “What’s going in in your business?” “How can I help?” “What do you need from me?”

HP Canada's John Cammalleri

SPONSORED CONTENT – With the increasing popularity of the “bring your own” trend, more and more customers are turning to their channel partners for advice on how to implement a strategy that makes sense for both their business and their employees. As these discussions become more frequent, there is a real opportunity for partners to bring their IT leadership to the table and position themselves as the go-to resource for future IT strategy.

The best “bring your own” strategies are developed with an understanding of how every device plays a role. Although the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) trend has gained momentum in terms of mobile devices, where does the PC fit in? An understanding of Canadian sentiments towards Bring Your Own Computer (BYOC) will help resellers address customer concerns and develop appropriate IT strategies for hardware management.

According to a recent HP Canada survey of over 1,000 Canadian small business owners and employees about the “bring your own” trend, BYOC is not a popular choice, with 78 per cent of small and medium-sized business owners and managers indicating that they have no intention of adopting BYOC policy in the near future.

But what is the underlying cause of Canadians’ cautious attitudes towards adopting BYOC? The motivating factors behind these sentiments provide valuable insights for resellers looking for alternate “bring your own” solutions, like cloud-based applications or virtualization, for their customers.

The survey indicates security concerns are a major factor preventing Canadian SMBs from adopting BYOC, as noted by the 71 per cent of respondents who said they would not allow employees to use their own computers at work. Another important factor, cited by 48 per cent of respondents, includes legal and HR issues, such as what to do if an employee leaves the company and who is responsible for wiping the device clean of sensitive information.

At the end of the day businesses are looking for the right technology solutions to meet their organizational and employee needs – and employees aren’t asking for BYOC. Seventy-one per cent of those surveyed stated no factors would entice them to bring their personal PC to work. For a majority (63 per cent) the main reason is the desire to keep their professional and personal lives separate.

The key take away from these findings that partners can advise to their clients is that for employees, work-life balance isn’t as much about turning work off once they leave the office, but having the ability to be flexible with when they access work information. As a result, for some organizations, looking at ways to move more aspects of the business such as file storage, email and software applications like Customer Relationship Management tools into the cloud could be more beneficial than adopting a BYOC policy.

As new technology trends like “bring your own” continue to emerge, a deep understanding of how these trends will impact clients will allow resellers to help guide long-term technology strategies and provide the right solutions – whether advising a BYOC policy or new cloud-based solutions.

Guest blogs like this are part of ChannelBuzz.ca’s annual sponsorship packages. Find out more here.

Citrix CEO Mark Templeton

SAN FRANCISCO – In his own inimitable way, Citrix chief Mark Templeton delivered a strong message to the company’s channel partners today: specialization and solutions sales are key to a thriving, successful partner base.

It’s a story that’s been told before, but with an interesting wrinkle, as most things have when Templeton is involved.

You see, for Templeton, re-architecting his company and its partnering efforts around a solutions focus is a familiar journey, dating back to a previous life as an Apple dealer in 1984.

The company was successful, he said, not because it sold a lot of Macs, printers, and software. The company was successful because it sold the vision of desktop publishing.

“It was about answering what people wanted to do — creating beautifully designed documents just like professionals do,” Templeton told partners.

And in the same way, the company is moving away from urging partners to sell customers on the myriad products it makes across its virtualization, networking and cloud services markets. Welcome to solutions-focused selling, with a Citrix twist.

The chief executive’s theme was preceded by a presentation from sales and services leader Al Monserrat, where he said that for Citrix, solutions are all about “what people want to do.”

“You don’t want to go to a customer and say ‘You want XenDesktop,’” Monserrat told partners. “You want to go them to implement a bring-your-own-device solution. It’s a specific need.”

In that vein, Monserrat detailed how Monserrat is packing up all of the company’s offerings around seven solutions areas: executive mobility; bring your own device; and workshifting under the “mobile workstyles” column, and under the “cloud services” category: unified storefronts; desktop virtualization; enterprise cloud networks; and cloud convergence.

Going with solution sales around those categories allows partners to get in on “bigger deals, shorter cycles” while having “greater impact” for customers.

And not surprisingly for a company that sells in multiple categories, the pitch also includes selling across categories. Monserrat said that by focusing on solutions and cross-selling and up-selling, many solution providers are able to “more than double” the size of deals.

Templeton added that specialization will be key for partners, both in terms of the technologies they represent and the verticals they serve, and hinted that going forward, Citrix would be working to enable partners around those areas of specialization.

“Specialization is an important idea for all of us. There’s an immutable law: special purpose beats general purpose,” he said.

When it comes to the cloud, there’s a different version of the “build vs. buy” debate, Templeton told partners – should partners make their way into the cloud by reselling others’ cloud services, or building their own?

The answer is a simple one, in Templeton’s estimation: “Yes.”

The chief executive urged partners to both resell others’ cloud services and build their own cloud services and applications. Of course, he’d be very appreciative if they’d see fit to do so by reselling Citrix’s GoToMeeting and other Web services, and building their own Web services using XenServer, NetScaler and other Citrix technology products.

He acknowledged that it can be tough to know exactly where to go when it comes to moving into the cloud world, but he, Monserrat and worldwide channel chief Tom Flink stressed that changes must be made.

Templeton brought up another example of his own past – in 2001, the decision to evolve the company from a one-product focus (Metaframe) into the multi-product company it is today. Today, what is now known was desktop virtualization represents the majority of the business, but has significant growth opportunities in its cloud and collaboration businesses.

Looking forward, Templeton said he sees desktop virtualization representing 50 per cent of the business, with 23 per cent of the business in cloud and 20 per cent in collaboration.

And the remaining seven per cent?

That, he said, was the source of much debate and conjecture, but ultimately, he said it would be filled by mobile and cloud services.

“We’ll take this platform that we’ve built, we’ll make fantastic programs for you to build your future on, and you’ll see that Citrix is greater than the sum of its parts, the sum of its people, and greater than the some of its partnerships,” Templeton concluded.

Citrix channel chief Tom Flink

SAN FRANCISCO – Citrix kicks off its 2012 Summit and Synergy events Monday afternoon with the keynotes of its Summit partner conference here.

Expect program and market updates from Citrix CEO Mark Templeton, sales chief Al Monserrat and channel chief Tom Flink, and probably a bit of Moody Blues – it is Templeton’s show, after all.

And of course I’ll be live in the keynote hall, bringing you the updates as they happen. The blog should go live when the keynotes begin – 4:00 pm Pacific (7:00 pm Eastern) so join me there if you’re not at the Moscone Center yourself.

Ingram Micro cloud and managed services chief Renée Bergeron

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but Canadian businesses aren’t turning to the cloud at quite the same rate as their U.S.-based compatriots.

But Renée Bergeron, Ingram Micro’s North American cloud chief (and a Canadian herself) sees that shifting. The distributor doubled its cloud business in 2011, and is ahead of schedule to do so again in 2012, she said in a meeting during the VentureTech Network Spring Invitational late last week in Colorado Springs. Things may have been progressing more slowly in Canada than elsewhere historically – but that all changed in the fall of last year.

“We’re really seeing growing momentum,” Bergeron said.

And that’s particularly true in the area of remote infrastructure management – far and away the most popular category of cloud-based solutions Ingram is selling to Canadian solution providers.

“There are valid concerns about security and outages, real concerns, and you have to make sure you partner with a vendor who’s got the right level of security and redundancy, but resellers are getting more and more comfortable with these topics,” Bergeron said.

Part of the lag has been the classic Canadian conservatism – but that’s eroding as cloud becomes much more mainstream, and more businesses become familiar with peers’ successes with cloud solutions. Of course, a big part of the distributor’s value proposition in the cloud space is that vendors that make its linecard have been vetted – both in terms of the their willingness and ability to work with solution providers and in terms of the technology they provide meeting the grade. That makes it a lot easier for VARs to get signed up, Bergeron suggests.

“Resellers are always telling me that it’s hard to do the due diligence with the solutions, and to sign contracts with the vendors,” she said. “But if they work through Ingram, they’ve got a simplified process.”

The linecard continues to expand – and with the company’s Cloud Summit event just weeks away, expect more partnerships to be announced. Accessibility at a national level is always a concern, and nowhere is that moreseo the case than in the cloud, where privacy and other regulatory issues can a be a showstopper for Canadian VARs looking to work with vendors from other countries.

But Bergeron said that where applicable, it’s typically spinning up partnerships with multinational cloud vendors in Canada bout six weeks after those partnerships go live in the U.S. And at the same time, the company continues to seek specific “made in Canada” cloud solutions where they make sense.

“It’s one thing to have global vendors that deliver in local countries, but it’s also important to have a number of local companies that specialize in a market.”

At VTN, Bergeron shared some statistics from the company’s cloud partners:

• 71.5 per cent of VARs surveyed are selling cloud services, with another 21.7 per cent planning to get on board in the next year. Only 6.8 per cent said they had no plans.
• However, a lot of partners appear to be “kicking the tires” with a few select customers – the vast majority of VARs Ingram works with in the cloud have fewer than 500 seats of cloud-based solutions deployed – only 10.9 per cent have more than 1,000 managed customer seats.
• Of the cloud solutions being sold, 74 per cent are to a VAR’s existing customers – 26 per cent are to new customers.
• Any lastly, while VTN partners were among the company’s early adopters when it comes to cloud, other groups are now growing much fater. While Ingram doubled its cloud bookings in 2011, VTN members grew their cloud bookings through Ingram by about 28 per cent over the same timframe. Meanwhile, members of Ingram’s SMB Alliance saw their bookings of Ingram-sold cloud services jump by 136 per cent.

“You guys were the early movers. You adopted managed services and cloud before others did, but others are catching up,” she cautioned VTN members. “They’re adopting cloud solutions faster, and that presents both an opportunity and a threat for all of you.”

Next up on Bergeron’s agenda: the company’s third annual Cloud Summit, June 4-6 in Scottsdale, Arizona. Although only three years old, it’s an event that’s seen a lot of evolution – and this year, Bergeron said, the focus is on moving from cheerleading and educating to more actionable business items.’

“A lot of the discussion is on driving the business forward,” Bergeron said. “We’re moving from 101, to 201 and 301 stuff – our resellers have grown and adopted, they’ve drank the Kool-Aid. Now we need to help them get to the next level.

There will, of course, be some best practices shared – including Ingram’s own lessons from shifting its sales associates’ compensation model to one that better and more accurately recognizes the small recurring revenues nature of cloud sales.

Bergeron said she would use the event to put some attention on application development – a skillset that the distributor increasingly believes is critical for solution providers going forward. While PaaS and IaaS are growing more rapidly than SaaS, software as a service still represents the biggest cloud-based opportunity, and Bergeron does not see that balance shifting too far anytime in the near future.

“Resellers have got to get in the game on the business apps side of thing,” she said, suggesting that it’s such an app-centric world that solution providers that choose not to participate risk losing even established customers to upstarts that do.

It’s a cute tagline, to be sure, and one that proved popular with members. Canadian council president Rob Bracey of Quartet Service proclaimed it the first of the themes that Ingram marketing comes up with that has really resonated with him. But many partners said it was a theme that really got to the heart of the strength of the community.

Also, the event marks the beginning of John Fago’s third year as the Ingram Micro lead for the reseller community. I sat down with Fago to discuss the evolution of the community, and how that’s been reflected by the themes of the last three years of activity in the VTN community.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yBXIxs-Xmk

As the show opens, I sat down with Mike Fouts, North American channel chief at Citrix, to get a quick rundown of what to expect at Summit, and a bit of a hint at what’s on the agenda for Synergy as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvGY7-ewQR0

Interested in more? I’ll be at the event today through Wednesday – along with other coverage, expect to see liveblogs of Monday evening’s Summit keynote as well as Wednesday morning’s Synergy-opening events.

Tibor Shanto, VARCoach and chief sales officer at Renbor Sales Solutions

Every business is different, every businessperson is different, and each sales person has unique attributes than the next.  But there is one thing that is absolutely the same for all, and that is time.  Every one of us has 24 hours at the start of each day, good, bad or between, we all get that exact same amount every day.  The question then comes down to how you use it, which is where you have not only an opportunity to differentiate your company from the next, but to determine your success.

At this point many start thinking about time management, but that is not what this is about.  In fact I’ll state right here that I think “time management” is a stupid and dangerous concept.  You can talk about time in different ways, but in the end, if you are in sales, or a business owner responsible for generating revenue for your company, there are only two things you can do with time:  you can use it or waste it!  Which is why talk of managing time is just a waste of time.

Time already comes managed, 24 hours to a day, 7 days per week, 52 weeks per year; whether you are in Chilliwack, Chile or China, it is settled and managed.  It is much more productive to talk about allocating time to specific activities, and then managing your activities in the time allocated.

Let’s look at time differently; in North America, the average sales rep has 1,760 hours of selling or face time; if we were to change time to dollars, and said to a rep, here is your investment capital, your job is to grow it by whatever your quota is, a 10% increase in revenues.  Looked at as investment capital, you would look at which assets you would allocate portions of the capital to ensure a 10%.  Some would go to equity, some to debt, some to assets like gold, and so on.   The same can be done with time, where the allocations are made to specific activities, be they prospecting, actively selling, client care, admin, product knowledge, training, putting out fires.  Based on your business, territory make up and other factors, you would execute these activities in proportions that best suit your reality.  If you are a small or medium enterprise owner, you likely have more activities making demands on your time, if you are a contractor you need to allow time for the work.

It is also important to look at this from a broader than a daily view, for sales I recommend you look at an entire sales cycle.  If your decide that you need to allocate 20 per cent of your time to prospecting, then make sure you spend 20% of those 60 day prospecting, not specifically 20 per cent of each day.

Then make sure that you reflect those times in your calendar, blocking (allocating) off the time in your calendar.  You plan for other assets, you need to plan for the time as well.  Most sales people do not put all their key activities in their calendar, which is why they fail; if it needs to be done then it is as important as anything in your calendar today.

Once you begin the habit of allocating time, and managing your activities within those times, you will also eliminate the need to “multi-task”, another stupid concept.  Multi-tasking is just an opportunity to NOT get a whole bunch of things done at the same time.  Human beings are not built to execute many tasks at once at a quality level.  Sure you can take a call and send stuff to the printer at the same time, but when it comes to revenue related activities, you cannot afford to make half efforts.  If you allocate your time, and then manage you actions, you will reduce or eliminate the need to multi-task.

I don’t want to pretend that this can be done with a snap of a finger, but it is worth taking the steps to ensure that you do regain control over YOUR time.  When it comes to selling or successfully running a business, people rarely run out of ideas or skills, they usually run out of time.

LAS VEGAS

IBM has created a ‘cloud sandbox’, the PureSystems Cloud Trial, that will be available to developers for 90 days, to create and test applications through SmartCloud that are ready to run on the new systems. The company says by removing the hassle of server provisioning, operating system and middleware set up, and the complicated cycles of permissions and procurement associated with software development, a developer can take an idea and be creating and testing it within minutes, instead of the days something like this would normally require.


There are already more than 150 PureSystems solutions from more than 125 ISVs, but IBM is looking for a lot more. Clients can now nominate ISV patterns they would like to see in the PureSystems Centre, and enablement events for Business Partners are being hosted at IBM Innovation Centers in 25 cities globally.

In addition to the developers’ sandbox, IBM announced a Virtual Pattern Kit to enable business partners and clients to convert technology expertise into reusable, downloadable packages of their own that can be embedded directly into the PureSystems machines to automate a wide range of manual and administrative IT tasks. The company also introduced several new patterns, including a pattern that gives clients the ability to foster collaboration, expertise location and sharing among their employees, IBM Business Process Manager, and a pattern that drives deployment of IBM Cognos Business Intelligence applications in 20-minutes.

Based on four years work and more than $2 billion in R&D, PureSystems features a new middleware layer that aims to automate both infrastructure and applications, offering workflows from IBM itself, from its third-party partners, and offering IT the ability to define its own workflows. The first two products in the family, PureFlex, which integrates server, storage and networking into one package,; and PureApplication, which automates software based on the patterns and processes of IBM’s own work with customers and partners, are expected to ship this quarter in both Intel and Power-based configurations.

Like PureSystems, the other half of the Impact news is also a work in progress, although here IBM says the mobility opportunity is worth a potential $22 billion this year, reaching $36B by 2015. Based on its Worklight acquisition, which, perhaps unsurprisingly has a platform called Mobile Foundation (V5.0), IBM announced its own Mobile Foundation, consisting of software and services targeted at enterprise mobile environments. IBM’s version is a portfolio of software and services designed to help organizations capitalize on the proliferation of mobile environments — including laptops, smartphones and tablets. Worklight, a privately held Israeli-based provider of mobile software for smartphones and tablets, was acquired at the end of January.

Core capabilities in Mobile Foundation include building on IBM WebSphere Cast Iron to connect mobile applications to a variety of cloud and back-end systems, a new set of development and integration tools from IBM Worklight, new software from IBM Endpoint Manager to address the Bring Your Own Device explosion, and a new set of services, such as the IBM Quick Win Pilot. And new capabilities in the IBM DataPower appliances to quickly and securely expose enterprise data and services to mobile devices.

Canada accounts for just under 10% of the 9.000 customers and partners in attendance, but other than saying hundreds of partners were here, IBM kept the details to itself.

Case in point: just six weeks into his new role, Romero visited the company’s Canadian headquarters in Mississauga, Ont. with his team. That’s where I caught up with Romero and Ingram Micro Canada chief Mark Snider to discuss the synergies he sees between the two businesses, what lessons from the Canadian business he’s taking back to headquarters, and how VARs can approach their own mobile practices successfully.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnKRenTb9No

Also be sure to check out part one of my video interview with Romero and Snider for their thoughts on building the Ingram mobile strategy.

The distributor has been focused on the mobile opportunity for some time in Canada, including inking deals with “the big three” Canadian telcos, but with Romero coming on at headquarters, expect Ingram to get even more serious about the business.

I caught up with Romero and Ingram Micro Canada general manager Mark Snider during Romero’s recent visit to Toronto, to talk about the mobile opportunity as he sees it, and Ingram’s strategy for pursuing that opportunity.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_yhCPL3_Uo

Check out part two of my video interview with Romero tomorrow, where he and Snider discuss the lessons of the Canadian subsidiary’s well-established mobile practice, among other topics.

Tibor Shanto, VARCoach and chief sales officer at Renbor Sales Solutions

Last time out I talked about the need and upside of having a sales process.Once you embrace a sales process, define the basic elements outlined, you can look at taking the benefits further in your revenue generating activities. One of those benefits, one that many without a process struggle to archive, specifically alignment.

Alignment not only helps remove obstacles and friction from a sales, it allows for more efficient use of resources, including time, faster sales cycles, and more solid relationships.

First and foremost is alignment with your buyers.  A sales process is half of the revenue equation, this is hard for some sellers accept, the other half, the buyers’ BUYING PROCESS is more important.  Don’t believe me, where does the revenue (money) come from?  Exactly!  So aligning your selling with the buying process will give you a tangible advantage over competitors, I would argue, if all things were equal between you and a competitor, but they were selling without a process, unaware of the buyer’s process, you’ll win every time.

Alignment with the buyer is key, not just from a product/solution perspective, but the decision perspective. Nothing scares a buyer more than when a seller gets ahead of them in the process, especially at critical points in the cycle.  Looking at the graphic below, it is easy to see how a seller, who is trying to close, when the buyer is still defining their requirements, will risk the sale.

Internal alignment is also important for sales success and customer satisfaction. Whether you are a vendor, a VAR, etc.  a sales process allows you to align with other key groups that impact the sale. Most obvious would be marketing or product development.  It is not hard to find instances where marketing and sales were not on the same page; this can usually be traced to the fact that either one or both do not have a defined process in place.  This makes it hard to understand what needs to be done, when, by who, hand-offs, and more, needed to move things forward.  When the respective processes are aligned, not only are issues resolved more easily, but you gain a competitive advantage to responding to market opportunities and specific client requirements.

If you are in a channel environment, then you have one other opportunity to align for more sales and profits, by aligning the vendor’s sales process with the reseller’s.  In most instances, many resellers do not have a formal sales process, this makes it easier for vendors to extend and push their sales process out to their resellers.  What better way to pass on best practices, and have a reseller imprint on you, not just based on product, but the ability to monetize opportunities.

Two things to consider, first you may not want to do this for the entire channel, you may want to be selective based on specific criteria, these will differ based on the organizations involved, but not difficult to figure out once you’ve defined objectives.  The second is a false concern held by some, specifically their fear that if they extend their process out, the reseller may also use it to sell other products.  So what?  The reality is that if you can indoctrinate a reseller to your way of selling, with all that it includes, all that is captured in the process as outlined last time, you sales and wallet share will increase; especially when that process is wrapped around your product or solution.

Edison Peres, Cisco's global channel chief

SAN DIEGO – Cisco partners know – and if they don’t, company staff from John Chambers on down will remind them – that Cisco loves to measure things.

The company has made measurements of customer satisfaction key to its partner recognition programs, as a measure of the value solution providers bring to the company and their joint customers.

But now, it seems like Cisco is poised to provide partners with some tools by which to measure the networking giant, and the value it brings to its solution providers. Global channel chief Edison Peres used a good part of his keynote discussion at the company’s Partner Conference here to discuss the concept of “return on Cisco” and using its programs to help partners add to their own valuation.

“Our goal in addition to supporting your profitability … is we want to maximize your business value and optimize your return on Cisco,” Peres told partners at the event.

Peres described an expansion of the company’s existing “return on Cisco” mantra that would measure not only the profitability of partners working with the vendor, but also taking a look at how working with Cisco adds to a solution provider’s valuation.

In preparing for the effort, Peres said he had talked to a number of investors who had either acquired, or were in the process of acquiring, Cisco partners, about what had drawn the investors to those particular organizations. In doing so, he said he found four common factors: operating profits, the potential for growth, the business risk around the company, and the sustainability of the partner’s business model.

“These are four areas we believe we can influence,” Peres said, adding that future partner programs will be measured in terms of their ability to drive those specific metrics.

Peres called the shift the next evolution in Cisco’s approach to thinking about partner value, which has already shifted dramatically from product margins to relationship ROI. That said, Peres reassured partners that he was not tossing out the company’s focus on profitability, just adding the long-term view to its pictures.

“Our focus is on helping you build a strong, highly-valued business,” he said.

The change appears to be a directional shift in the spirit of the one made a decade ago by then-channel chief Paul Mountford, when he announced that the company was going to shift the focus of its partner programs from rewarding partners for the volume they sell to rewarding partners for the volume they provide.

In the future, the company will orient its programs towards ways to boost the valuation of its partners. But what happens when it cannot do so, or when the policies, programs and procedures it uses with partners do just the opposite? Harry Zarek, CEO of Compugen, muses on just that topic in a blog post from the event.

One prediction is the Cisco will find out that they inadvertently do things that actually take away from partner business value rather than enhance it. That would be a defining moment in the maturing of the relationship between Cisco and its partners.

Synnex Canada president Mitchell Martin

NEW ORLEANS – As this year’s Spring Varnex conference here is just the fourth at which Canadians have been in attendance, it’s tempting to think about the Varnex Canada group as the newbies in the reseller group world.

But the group is growing rapidly, having gone from 32 members at last year’s fall event in Las Vegas to 60 in the Big Easy this week, said Mitchell Martin, president of Synnex Canada. And it’s done that despite Synnex remaining selective, and focused on smaller, SMB-focused solution providers.

“We’re working hard to get to where we want to be in terms of membership, and we’ve made great progress,” he said.

“Where we’d like to be” is about 80 members in the short term (say, by the time the group returns to Vegas this fall) and closer to 100 in the long term, said Mike Gazdic, vice president of marketing.

And with growing presence in the Canadian reseller community, the group is getting more attention from vendors – Varnex has welcomed on Microsoft, Lenovo, StorageCraft and Symantec as Canadian sponsors this year, Martin said.

It’s a growth that Martin sees snowballing – as the community reaches scale, it will find it easier to gain traction with both new members and new vendors. For Martin, it’s all about the total addressable market the Varnex community can reach. And as it grows, so to will the distributor’s investment in the Canadian community, with a Canada-only Varnex event likely to debut next year.

“As we get to relevant level of TAM and we fill in some holes from a vendor perspective, we’ve got the scale to get the financial resources to do one more [event] per year, which would be Canada-only,” he said.

In growing its member base, Martin said there are still regions that need more representation. Oddly enough, they’re the larger markets in Canada. The Varnex community is strong in some of the smaller cities in the country, and outside of the major centres, largely thanks to Synnex’s background in those regions with warehouses in Alberta and Nova Scotia, the traditional “hotbeds” of solution providers – Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver – remain opportunities for community growth, and would round out the community’s coverage story cross-Canada.

The opportunity, for Synnex and for members, is huge, Martin said. He believes that with a member base of about 100 Canadian Varnex members, the community can corner about 20 per cent of the Canadian SMB market, a significant portion of the business outside of the large DMRs and retailers that work in the space.

Gazdic expressed confidence that by the time the group gathers again in Las Vegas in November, the community will be around 80 members, and said that Synnex was working to create a broader team within the organization to support Varnex members and to build business development opportunities for the group.

Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior

SAN DIEGO – After spending most of Tuesday on strategy and partner programs, Cisco turns its attention to products and solutions Wednesday at its annual Partner Summit here, kicking off the morning with a keynote session anchored by CTO Padmasree Warrior.

Chief among the topics of discussion: the trend towards bring your own device, and what it means for Cisco and its partners. Warrior will be joined by other executives, including collaboration chief Barry O’Sullivan and global enterprise boss (and former channel chief) Paul Mountford.

And, of course, we’ll be there liveblogging the events as they happen – starting at about 9 am Pacific time, noon Eastern time.

We’ll see you after the jump in the liveblog

In part three of my video interview with Mark Sokol, senior marketing manager at ConnectWise, we discuss the company’s view of the Canadian market and where he sees opportunities for Canadian MSP partners.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtFLqZLi1rk

Also check out parts one and two of my conversation with Sokol, where we addressed the state of the MSP industry, and the company’s community-building efforts, respectively.

SAN DIEGO

Bell took home East partner of the year and managed cloud partner of the year, Telus earned SMB partner of the year and vertical/solutions innovation partner of the year, while Long View carried the West Partner of the year and Data Centre/Virtualization partner of the year.

Canadians solution providers were also well-represented on the Global and Americas stages, with Bell Canda also notching global public sector of the year partner, while IBM Canada earned global services partner of the year. OnX Enterprise Solutions earned the Canadian partner of the year category in the Americas Theatre awards.

Also earning awards were Central partner of the year IBM, Professional Services partner of the year Dimension Data, Collaboration partner of the year MTS Allstream, Borderless Network partner of the year CompuCom and Business Video partner of the year CBCI Telecom.

Mike Ansley, vice president of the partner organization at Cisco Canada, said that as he was reading the names of the award winners on the main stage, he was struck by two statistics common among the event’s big award winners: their year-over-year growth rates, and their penetration rates into the company’s advanced technology areas.

“I really hope to inspire all of the partners in the room with some of the outstanding successes of the last year,” Ansley said.

But how is Cisco gearing up to help its Canadian channel partners realize the opportunity that’s likely to come from the government’s focus on Telepresence? I put that question to a trio of the company’s top leadership, including CEO John Chambers, EVP of worldwide sales (and Canadian) Rob Lloyd, and COO Gary Moore during a press session with channel press during the company’s Partner Summit here Tuesday afternoon.

Lloyd discusses how the company will work to make sure the mandate becomes a reality, while Chambers details the momentum the company is seeing with its partners in the Telepresence sphere.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7otPaSjONUk

Six months later, I sat down with Stegner at this week’s Varnex Spring Conference here to find out what kind of progress was being made.

Stegner also talks about what comes next for the growing Varnex Canadian community, plans for a Canada-only Varnex event, and why Canadian Varnex members can expect to see a lot more of the U.S.-based executive over the next 18 months.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=630zC_Ughh4